This weekend, Fox News had a “debate” over global warming between Senate denier James Inhofe and Dem Ed Markey, chair of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. The question: Does global warming actually exist?

This is of course not really a debate, but biased coverage that undermines what we know by suggesting there is really an open question here. Think Progress has more, including this stunning exchange between host Chris Wallace and Inhofe:

WALLACE: The fact is, just this week, the world meteorological organization said that this decade is the warmest on record, and that 2009 is the 5th warmest year on record. Does that mean nothing?

INHOFE: It means very little. Because that was based on the same flawed science — the IPCC science — that we have been looking at.

Yup–for Inhofe, it’s all a vast conspiracy and it all centers on the IPCC. Even though the IPCC only assesses the science every 5 years, and certainly hasn’t assessed the temperature record between, um, its assessments….

So if it is hotter in summer and colder in winter, to the tune of 30 or 40 degrees nominal, because the poles of the earth are closer or farther from the sun. Why do you have to be a crazy conspiracy theorist to suggest maybe if the surface of the sun is hotter or colder, solar activity vs passivity, it could change the weather by oh say .3-.5 degrees?

Basically the CRU used tree ring studies for 1960-1980 temps showing low temps, and then “trick”ed the graph by abruptly switching to real temps from 1980 onward. I wish I could hand pick stocks from 1900 to now by decade depending on their gain, that could be a cool chart but would not show the great depression or the 80’s S&L crisis or the tech bubble.

LOOK AT THE RAW DATA, oh wait there is none just pretty graphs everywhere. Sounds like the same pretty graphs Bernie Madoff customers bought into, the fewer questions asked the worse the results

“Why do you have to be a crazy conspiracy theorist to suggest maybe if the surface of the sun is hotter or colder, solar activity vs passivity, it could change the weather by oh say .3-.5 degrees?”

You don’t have to be crazy at all. You would be crazy, of course, if you refuse to listen to the experts who have talked about this a million times and have discussed it a million times and have already considered the “It’s caused by the sun” argument. Let me lay it out for you as clearly as I can.

Until someone proves the following incorrect: (1)the sun warms the planet with UV light rays, (2)greenhouse components such as CO2 and methane absorb UV light rays, and (3)the amount of CO2 and methane has increased – then I won’t be dissuaded from thinking that the Greenhouse effect is real. And therefore, it is logical to assume that the Earth is absorbing more energy from the Sun (which Thermodynamics proves will cause warming).

I don’t think it’s just Fox News with the he said, she said approach. Many news organizations want to look fair and balanced, so they present two sides of an argument, even if one side is wrong. That may just be the nature of journalism.

I must have not viewed that argument any where Harman. Could you help me clear up the science. What was the final synopsis on why if the sun gets hotter and more active it DOES NOT affect the earth temp? I am sure if there is such a consensus that solar activity does not play a role you can let me know pretty quickly why.

My simple view is if I light a fire and move my hand closer to it, it gets hotter. Likewise if I move my hand away it gets colder. In the same fashion if I keep my hand constant and make the fire hotter, my hand gets hotter.

The greenhouse “effect” is real. CO2 can trap and retain heat. Multiplying the amount of CO2 PPM in the atmosphere currently by 5 still only slightly affects raw temps by 1 degree or less. The issue is then expanded by multiplying future predicted temps by hotter temps, and creating an exponential log graph that has no basis in reality thus scaring and fear mongering people into submission, see Colin Powell at UN with satellite photos of Saddam WMD’s.

dam the one side that is always wrong. If only we could “call them out” and shut them up for having a totally uneducated opinion based on fearless leaders who think a few miles down the earth is millions of degrees.

The reason why it’s not the sun, is there’s no evidence that the sun has caused the warming we’ve seen:

“According to PMOD at the World Radiation Center there has been no increase in solar irradiance since at least 1978 when satellite observations began. This means that for the last thirty years, while the temperature has been rising fastest, the sun has shown no trend.”

No increase in sunspot and solar activity since 1978? What is your definition of Solar irradiance? Let’s agree solar radiance is constant, then sun spots heat up this constant, and lack of sun spots maintains the constant.

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/
shows several graphs and provides data. The number of sun spots and solar activity run in cycles the most recent being a high of 120+ linked spots in late 90’s to almost zero for the past two years.

Variations in the Sun’s total energy output (luminosity) are caused by changing dark (sunspot) and bright structures on the solar disk during the 11-year sunspot cycle. The variations measured from spacecraft since 1978 are too small to have contributed appreciably to accelerated global warming over the past 30 years.

So no, solar irradiance has not cause the rise in temperatures we’ve seen.

BCB – Why don’t you explaint to me, or show me a link that explains how the Earth gets hotter when we tilt toward the sun (which I am assuming you mean two times a year)? And not when the Earth’s elliptical orbit is actually closer to the Sun.

Tilt, move, shake, gravitationly pull all equal = move closer to. Last time I looked in the summer the sun seems to be high overhead and in the winter it seems closer to the horizon.

here, let the navy explain it:http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/seasons_orbit.php
“As a result, when the Earth is at a certain place in its orbit, the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun and experiences summer. Six months later, when the Earth is on the opposite side of the Sun, the northern hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun and experiences winter.”

Just amuse yourself for one minute, what if by chance a few people pieced together a graph of temp data that allowed for “homogenisation” of data. Also they switched data sets at various points. Well why then Solar activity looks great matching up with the risa and fall of temps EXCEPT since 1980? It seems after 1978 something happened and most temp data sets do not match up with solar activity. One can say well see the link is broken CO2 has increased that must be the cause. But one can also say well let’s look at the raw temp data without any “Homogenisation” say from a satellite and see if that matches up?

BartonCreekBett – you are spouting off with alot of very elementary stuff. It is good that you have at least a basic understanding of some earth science. Do you honestly think that the climate science community has not taken all of this elementary stuff into account? Do you have the slightest idea how deep the leading experts in any filed of science have gone.

You or I cannot hope to fully understand what these guys do. Your denial is a slap in the face of modern science, and should be entirely ignored.

Wow. Those who agree that climate change is happening but don’t think humans play a role are one thing, but people like Inhofe who think that climate change isn’t even happening to begin with are in the full-on depths of Silly Little Denialist dumbassitude.

I suppose he should take a trip to the Himalayas, where people are starting to lose their drinking water sources due to glacier melt. Or Alaska, where people’s homes are getting swallowed in melting permafrost collapse. Or perhaps he could take a sailing trip through the Northwest Passage. Or join a biologist working a species whose range has shifted several kilometers in the last few years. Or go work with the folks in places like parts of Florida who are starting to have their drinking water polluted by saltwater itnrusion from rising sea levels.

Or not. Inhofe would probably just as gladly deny it all, and pretend the only evidence for climate change is based on a figure or two from an IPCC report. Conspiracy!!!!!

James
I am amazed. The same science community that uses “trick’s” to hide proxy data sets that do not match up and “hides” declining temp proxies? Since when have such simple questions been so hard to answer for such leading sciencetist’s? Maybe the Fortran code leaked explain it best, “add values from varspar for effect”. This from code line 1080 that inserts an operation to randomly adjust data. What happens when you take a data set and merge it with a random number from the Varspar set : -.8, -.2, 0, .2, .5, .9, 1.2 you get increased positives right???? how is that science???

So define “leading” expert. James Hansen? Mike Mann? The truth is much harder to find the more these crosslinked studies point to proxy data with no raw temp data to back them. The deeper into a field you go the more you are immersed in it. The more you are immorsed the more self satisfying you get. The more self satisfaction you gain the more you live in your own reality and seperate yourself from the simpler things in life

The climate scientists may have been expressing frustration in their confidential emails (according to Chris’s reporting, this is at the same time they were being slandered at inundated with politically motivated data requests) but the “trick” accusations are absolutely baseless. Again, all you need to do is 5 minutes worth of homework to find this out.

Jon, this is science? directly from the Factcheck.org”
“”
However, since about 1960, tree-ring data have diverged from actual measured temperatures. Far from covering it up, CRU scientists and others have published reports of this divergence many times. The “trick” that Jones was writing about in his 1999 e-mail was simply adding the actual, measured instrumental data into a graph of historic temperatures. Jones says it’s a “trick” in the colloquial sense of an adroit feat — “a clever thing to do,” as he put it — not a deception. What’s hidden is the fact that tree-ring data in recent decades doesn’t track with thermometer measurements.
“”

So “scientifically”, because the 1930’s diverge from the statistical norm for the stock market I can substitute other proxy data of my choosing and produce a scientific graph that shows 1900 to 1940 was a great time to invest?

So you can graph a dataset to a point, then switch the proxy to a completely seperate set of data and call it one contigious graph of similiar data? Very scientific. How bought you make two graphs of the data and then merge them? oh, that would just show normal temp variations, if you drop the lower tree ring temp’s and add in higher temp’s now that is a “trick”, and temps rise.

So you can graph a dataset to a point, then switch the proxy to a completely seperate set of data and call it one contigious graph of similiar data? Very scientific.

Of course not, Barton….but that’s not remotely what Mann and friends did. It’s pretty obvious you’ve never even read the paper you’re arguing about – just the emails and blog posts on them But nice attempt with the “oversimplify and attack” tactic. I like it.

Seriously, buddy. Try harder here. As shills come, you’re easier to see through than cheesecloth.

BCB,
No, it’s more like taking out stocks that *don’t* represent the statistical norm. Which, in fact, happens all the time with the Dow Jones. Do you really think the same stocks have been in the DJIA since the beginning?

Ironic how an example you chose to demonstrate how the scientists are doing it “wrong” actually demonstrates how they are doing it right!

Furthermore, had you bothered to look into the research articles, you would see that the tree ring data affected most by the failure to track the measured, instrumental temperatures is for trees in high latitudes and altitudes.

At least Fox News invites both sides. Who else does that? The problem is that no one knows with 100% certainty whether man has influenced climate change or if the climate is going through its natural cycle. I don’t remember who said it, but global warming started at the end of the last ice age.

Some climate-change deniers insist that the observed changes might be natural, perhaps caused by variations in solar irradiance or other forces we don’t yet understand. Perhaps there are other explanations for the receding glaciers. But “perhaps” is not evidence.

The greatest scientist of all time, Isaac Newton, warned against this tendency more than three centuries ago. Writing in “Principia Mathematica” in 1687, he noted that once scientists had successfully drawn conclusions by “general induction from phenomena,” then those conclusions had to be held as “accurately or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypothesis that may be imagined…. ”

Climate-change deniers can imagine all the hypotheses they like, but it will not change the facts nor “the general induction from the phenomena.”

Thank you Jon. The article on the Onion convinced me that the 90% certainty of “the panel” must be the truth. Perhaps we can persuade Theodore Hapner to abandon his plutonium research and instead attack global warming. We still call it global warming or, considering how cold it is in San Antonio, is climate change more appropriate? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgNpDBFKpwU

Good night Jon, and please keep an open mind. I am trying, but when I see “scientists” attack those who disagree instead of attacking the argument, the more skeptical I become. I think it is a little arrogant to think that humans can significantly change weather on a global scale any more than a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane.

DB– there are many, many scientists, not just those in that email exchange. You can’t claim you’ve seen the habits of every single scientist based on a dozen or so cherry picked emails from a decade plus worth of emails.

Also, as Chris has reported, these scientists were under attack from character assassins making requests that they saw as unreasonable, etc. Is it surprising that they’d be annoyed with the attackers? Especially in confidential emails?

And they are human beings. Just because you catch your math teacher swearing in the teachers lounge one day, doesn’t mean she taught you wrong when she said two plus two equals four. You could get someone to review her work, maybe. And in this case, no one has found any wrongdoing, other than swearing in the teachers lounge, as that Fact Check article I linked to attests.

DB– there are many, many scientists, not just those in that email exchange. You can’t claim you’ve seen the habits of every single scientist based on a dozen or so cherry picked emails from a decade plus worth of emails.

Also, as Chris has reported, these scientists were under attack from character @ss@ssins making requests that they saw as unreasonable, etc. Is it surprising that they’d be annoyed with the attackers? Especially in confidential emails?

And they are human beings. Just because you catch your math teacher swearing in the teachers lounge one day, doesn’t mean she taught you wrong when she said two plus two equals four. You could get someone to review her work, maybe. And in this case, no one has found any wrongdoing, other than swearing in the teachers lounge, as that Fact Check article I linked to attests.

One last word. If a jury was 90% convinced someone was guilty of murder, would you want him sent to death row? I hope not.

With something as important as climate change, we need to hear both sides and we need to hear the evidence. Propaganda has no place in something this important.

The cause to clean up the environment is noble and most everyone agrees we need to move to alternate energy sources. Just do it for the right reasons. Don’t muddy the waters with something that cannot be proven and do not try to silence those who disagree.

I enjoy a good argument and I try not to make it personal. Sometimes I slip.

“The panel concluded that it was at least 90% certain that human emissions of greenhouse gases rather than natural variations are warming the planet’s surface.”

I am now a believer, I mean 2,500 scientists can’t be wrong, no way they could be wrong.

Now all we need to do is simplify some of the science a bit, and explain it to people. I mean 90%, should be very easy to simply throw out the other conclusions. So let’s bring on the skeptical questions, answer and dispel them w/o hatred or politicization and move on down the road to taxing any and all carbon.

Oh wait the third world countries want higher emissions cuts from the west for the good of mankind, or to be paid off with carbon offsets, but anyways a few billion or trillion and reworking the whole power structure here on the globe is a small price to pay to reduce CO2 from say .04% to say .02% and hope it can save us………

It boils down to this : there are two sides here and the issue is politicised and muddy.

So let me please use an analogy & see if we can make sense of things.

Imagine your at the beach with a friend and your friend turns to you and says :

“Oh look the tide is coming in – really fast too!”

Now you turn and look at the sea and the sand and you see a high water mark where seaweed and flotsam has washed up, you see firm damp sand and the waves staying where they are & not seeming to advance or retreat. You’re not really sure if the tides actually going out or is stable but you’re sure its not coming in fast. So you turn to your friend & say :

“Nope, I don’t think so ..”

Now imagine that instead of the sea and tide we are looking at global temperatures and whether they’re rising or not.

Now the metaphorical highwater mark is the year 1998 which was, I understand, the hottest year ever recorded. Some pro-AGW folks say another year instead but that’s contentious and in any case certainly not much hotter. This year, 2009, their saying, I think, *may* be the fifth warmest. (5th? Pah! Get back to me when its at least second or third! 😉 )

Point is, according to the AGW believing side human CO2 is being added increasingly and going up all the time. It is supposedly causing catastrophic dangerous rapid warming.

So call me naive or whatever but if that’s then true shouldn’t each year be getting increasingly hot? If AGW was right shouldn’t we expect this year hotter than last hotter than the one before that? Surely?

The tide is meant to be coming in – but it doesn’t look that way. What we observe is a highwater mark in 1998 and then a series of years that are all cooler so things are either stable in a nice warm state or actually cooling off.

So human C02 can’t be doing too much damage then can it? It may well not have any thing to do with climate anyhow if adding so much is theoretically so bad but actually appearing to do nothing at all.

I know the AGW believers claim 1998 was an exceptional year and something special. D’uh! It was the hottest year ever! That’s exceptional sure – but that’s all. Maybe they’d have a point if it wasn’t so long ago – surely in the decade since then with all the constantly building up levels of Co2 that are meant to be causing the problem with all the rising heat we’re meant to be getting surely we’d have another exceptional year again? Don’t you reckon? If 1998 was even five years ago instead I might think they have a case. But over a decade ago? Come on! The climate just ain’t doing what the AGW mob said it would!

That common sense basic level practical test, to me anyhow, seems to indicate pretty conclusively that the AGW hypotheisis is wrong.

If you disagree with me, fine that’s your right – please explain to me exactly where I’m wrong preferably in plain english. Use my analogy if you can. I may be wrong & yeah, I know there’s a heck of a lot of scientists that support the AGW idea.

But lets go back to The Analogy Beach for a sec .

Imagine that you point out to your friend that the tide is not in fact rushing in & then he starts calling you a “Denier” and abusing you. Or that he starts waving his arms around and trying to throw your spare clothe sand towel and beach chair onto the road in front of speeding traffic and yelling : “Teh Tidezzz coming IN! Teh Tidezzz Coming in! RUN for your life! We’re all gunna DIII-IEEEE!!! “ Well it doesn’t really make sense or help his argument does it? In fact, you’d question your friends sanity.

But that’s what it looks to many folks (me too) like what the pro-AGW mob are sayin’ and how they’re acting.

Plus here’s a common-sense rule of thumb – anyone who predicts some dreadful apocalpyse tomorrow whether from religious or scientific causes is almost certainly wrong. The extremes are usually wrong. Not always & I ‘spose the world will end someday but generally if somebody starts preaching about how this or that “sign” means “The End is Nigh!”, .. Well take it with a shaker full of salt. The worlds still here and the list of failed Apocalypse predictions is nearly endless.

So The extreme AGW scenarios actually leave me less convinced of the whole :

human Co2 =DOOO-OOM! idea.

Thus no, I don’t think AGW is happening and even if it is I don’t think it’ll be any worse than Y2K. If its happening at all then it is probably natural – the Sun & Earth make human actions pale into insignificance. We’re just not big enough to change the climate in my opinion.

Besides even if GW is real and even if it ain’t natural, I don’t think its urgent or requires drastic measures – things just aren’t warming up at the alarming rate that’s advertised. We may well end up being better off and we will adapt and manage in any case.

Throw in the emails of the “Climategate” affair which seem to show the AGW believers manipulating or downright inventing data, appearing to be repressing contrary opinions and debate – generally looking very ugly and untrustworthy and well .. What rational person wouldn’t be skeptical of the AGW side?

That’s how I see where we are anyhow. Perhaps I’m wrong. But I don’t think so & will take a bit of convincing otherwise.

If you alter historical records you can make any year warmest or coldest on record.

Since climate scientists have “corrected” instrumental records, deleted original data to make comparisons impossible and did not make the corrections and rationale behind them openly available we have no way of checking if there is any truth to what they say.

After the climate gate fiasco which proved most prominent climate scientists in the field would rather commit crime then release their data subjected to FOI I have completely lost trust in what they have to say.

Unfortunately all the bizarre actions of CRU climate scientists can only be explained if one accepts they are guilty of tweaking the data to make it fit their preconceived beliefs.

The fact that there are numerous examples of such raw data “corrections” in where the past temperatures have been hugely corrected downward and modern temperatures upward only adds to the suspicion.

So, yes, even though I considered Inhofe a crackpot before I am now forced to agree with him that such proclamations concerning warmest and coldest years cannot be trusted.

Since we are to spend billions of dollars on fighting climate change, I believe it makes sense to use a tiny portion of that money to fund a public climate data registry filled with people who have no direct stake in the climate predictions and give them the task of reassembling the *RAW* climate data from meteorological stations around the globe, paying them enough to make that data freely available for everyone. This should be the data before ANY corrections are taken into account, a proper documentation for the purpose of making such corrections where needed also has to be assembled.

Only when such RAW data will be available it will be possible to verify whether the infamous “value added data” is actually sound or a scientific fraud.

Such a repository will also be needed for assessing any effects our measures have on climate, unfortunately most climatologists have a clear conflict of interest and as the climategate shows cannot be trusted.

Since I am not a scientist (just very curious), can one of you who is a scientist explain why a runaway greenhouse effect didn’t happen long ago when we know (from cores) that the planet was much warmer with significantly higher CO2 concentrations than there are today, but the AGW proponents fully expect us to become Venus-ized at much lower temps and CO2 concentrations in the (near) future?

thanks badJim. Dunning–Kruger effect very similar to “Band Wagon” logical fallacy. If 2500 scientists believe it, it must be true. But sometimes really smart people make dumb decisions. http://www.hygenius.com/pres.htm

StevoR: I guess you didn’t actually read the linked article about the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Sarcasm and name-calling rather than an actual serious conter-argument. What a surprise.

Guess that makes you a typical AGW Alarmist then! 😉

@ 39. Arrow Says:

If you alter historical records you can make any year warmest or coldest on record.

Since climate scientists have “corrected” instrumental records, deleted original data to make comparisons impossible and did not make the corrections and rationale behind them openly available we have no way of checking if there is any truth to what they say.

After the climate gate fiasco which proved most prominent climate scientists in the field would rather commit crime then release their data subjected to FOI I have completely lost trust in what they have to say.

Me too.

I thought we could trust the Climatologists before but now their credibility is at about the same level as used car salesmen and politicians – or lower.

If we can’t take all our own data – and we can’t trust theirs… then how can we know what the climate is really doing? (Other than thefact we know its not doing what the CRU wanted it to do or they wouldn’t have had to tamper with their info.) We’re in a pickle.

The CRU fraudsters have set science back a lot further than they realise & we absolutely need a full Congressional inquiry. We need the facts and the other side to get a proper chance to cross examine them. Those like Phil Jones and Mike Mann and Kevin Trenberth who it appears have committed outrageous acts of scientific malpractice and fraud need to be held accountable for their actions. If that means them serving jail time then so be it. The people need to know the truth and make decisions based on factual data not fraudulent manipulated muck. The only way climatologogists will ever be trusted again is if the whole scientific community admits its wrong doing, punishes and forever bars the offenders and puts asystem of real checks and safeguards against similar fraud ever happening again.

@ 40. badnicolez Says:

Since I am not a scientist (just very curious), can one of you who is a scientist explain why a runaway greenhouse effect didn’t happen long ago when we know (from cores) that the planet was much warmer with significantly higher CO2 concentrations than there are today, but the AGW proponents fully expect us to become Venus-ized at much lower temps and CO2 concentrations in the (near) future?

Not a scientist so I can’t answer. Sounds like a good point & one I’d like to see answered as well.

My view, for whatever its worth, is that the AGW issue indeed appears very much like a “he said /she said” debate.

True. The “he said” part is about 99% of the world’s best scientists and leading scientific organizations backing their conclusions up with over 20 years of hard data that have been published in thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. That scientifc evidence is now starting to be joined by a truckload of anecdotal evidence in the form of people losing their water sources to glacier melt, homes to permafrost melt, species disappearing due to rapid warming, and increased sea level rise.

On the other side are the “she said”s, who are stomping around the room with their arms folded whining “but fixing this is going to cost us a lot fo money!!!!! Therefore, I don’t think it’s real.”

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About Chris Mooney

Chris is a science and political journalist and commentator and the author of three books, including the New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science--dubbed "a landmark in contemporary political reporting" by Salon.com and a "well-researched, closely argued and amply referenced indictment of the right wing's assault on science and scientists" by Scientific American--Storm World, and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. They also write "The Intersection" blog together for Discover blogs.
For a longer bio and contact information, see here.